Today, there are concierge services located in hotels or operating as independent businesses or may be a portion of other service related entities. A concierge service, in a hotel, for example, helps the hotel guests by providing information such as location of a particular restaurant, or by performing a service such as obtaining a reservation of tickets for a show. In the context of an independent business, a concierge service provides services such as airline ticket reservations, hotel reservations, transportation service reservations, event ticket services, restaurant reservations, etc. Typically, a consumer contacts a concierge service with one or more requests, and the concierge service performs the requests and charges the consumer for the services provided. One of the drawbacks of using a concierge service, as it exists today, is that the services which a concierge provides are localized. Concierges may not be able to fulfill a request beyond the local limits of their expertise and access to various resources. For example, if a consumer, in San Francisco, is in need of a service in New York City, a concierge service in San Francisco may not be able to fulfill that request, if the concierge does not have access to resources in New York City.
Also, if a concierge service attempts to expand its reach by designating or establishing a series of local concierge services, the concierge service may find direct and timely response to consumer requests at these local sites difficult due to the logistics of communication and resource coordination among local concierges.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an automated system and method for managing consumers' requests with efficiency on a global scale.
Another problem that is exists for travelers is that their payment card transactions can be denied as they move from place to place, because fraud detection modules may incorrectly believe that a fraudulent transaction is occurring. For example, if a person lives in Los Angeles and is in Paris, France on business, a payment authorization module may deny authorization of the transaction if the person tries to purchase a good or service in Paris, and the person did not notify his payment card issuer of his travel prior to leaving for this business trip. This is because a fraud detection module that operates in conjunction with the authorization module may determine that the transaction is occurring outside of the person's home city and that any transactions occurring outside of the home city could be a potential fraud. If payment card transactions are inadvertently denied, sales using payments cards will decrease. This will result in reduced sales, because in some instances, the person may not conduct the purchase at all if the payment card transaction is denied.
These and other problems, are addressed by embodiments of the invention, individually and collectively.